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The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.

But archivists are uncertain whether the transfer will include all the electronic messages sent and received by the officials, because the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.

The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney's records. The coalition is contesting the administration's assertion in federal court this month that he "alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records" and "how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed," without outside challenge or judicial review.

Eventual access to the documentary record of the Bush presidency has been eagerly anticipated by historians and journalists because the president and his aides generally have sought to shield from public disclosure many details of their deliberations and interactions with outside groups.

"We are worried," said Arnita A. Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association, which sued the White House several years ago seeking wider access to presidential records than President Bush had said in a 2001 executive order that he wanted the government to provide. "There is a context that is not reassuring," she said.

The National Archives and Records Administration is supposed to help monitor the completeness of the historical record but has no enforcement powers over White House records management practices. Speaking of the missing e-mails, Archives' general counsel Gary M. Stern said in an interview last week that "we hope and expect they all will exist on the system or be recoverable," even in coming weeks. "We can't say for sure."

White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said last week that "we are making significant progress in accounting for the e-mail records stored on our computer network." But he declined to say how many e-mails remain missing or to predict how long the recovery will take because the issue is the subject of ongoing litigation.

The National Security Archive, a historical research group, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, a nonprofit watchdog organization, filed lawsuits in September 2007 to compel the White House to preserve backup e-mail tapes. In November 2007, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered White House officials to preserve such tapes and "not transfer said media out of their custody or control without leave of this court."

In the case of the vice president's records, the White House has promised a different federal judge that it will comply with a Nixon-era law requiring the preservation and transfer of all documents related to the vice president's official duties, but the coalition has drafted a filing for the court on Monday that accuses Cheney of subtly seeking to circumscribe the legal definition of what those official duties encompass to such a degree that he will be able to take home or destroy countless documents related to policymaking that historians want to see.

Anne Weisman, the counsel for the plaintiffs, called Cheney's assertion that only those records related to tasks specially assigned by Bush need to be preserved "a loophole . . . large enough to drive truckloads of documents through." It means, she said, that Cheney would not have to surrender documents related to legislation or "advice he gives the president on his own initiative and the influence he has over the president's decisions."

The scramble to find missing e-mails and copy them in a digital form that the Archives can comprehend amounts to a replay of the confusion that capped the transfer of President Bill Clinton's records at the end of his administration in 2001. Then, a series of defects in the White House e-mail archiving system led to congressional subpoenas and the administration's expenditure of $12 million to recover hundreds of missing e-mails from backup tapes. The effort was not completed until after Clinton left office.